It was cold and professional.
The voice of a stranger I'd been sleeping next to for six months.
The extraction point turns out to be an abandoned warehouse near the water. A helicopter waits, rotors already spinning. The pilot nods at Sawyer, and we lift into the darkness without questions or paperwork. Everything about this screams black ops, off-books, the kind of extraction that doesn't officially happen.
I open my laptop as soon as we're airborne, needing to work, to focus on something besides the heat still coursing through me from that kiss.
Stupid. Reckless.
But when we landed that impossible jump, when death became life in a heartbeat, I needed to feel something besides fear.
"What are you doing?" Sawyer shifts closer to see my screen, and his thigh presses against mine.
"Checking if my distributed backups are intact." My fingers fly across the keyboard, muscle memory taking over.
Seventeen different servers, each containing fragments of the Prometheus data, encrypted with a key derived from my grandmother's birthday, my parents' anniversary, and the GPS coordinates of their crash site—things Nathan knew but would never think to combine.
The encryption is AES-256 wrapped in my own algorithm, something I developed at MIT that never made it into my FBI work because it was too complex for standard implementation.
Server one: intact. Server two: intact. Server three: someone tried to access it six hours ago but failed the authentication. Nathan's digital fingerprints are all over the attempt. He's hunting my backups, but he doesn't know me as well as he thinks.
"I hid pieces of evidence across seventeen different servers, encrypted and fragmented. Even if they find some, they won't get all."
"Smart." Sawyer’s approval shouldn't matter, but warmth blooms in my chest anyway. "Tell me about Prometheus."
I pull up the files I've been compiling for three days, ever since I stumbled onto their communications hidden in blockchain transactions I was analyzing for cryptocurrency fraud.
"Attacks on water treatment facilities in Los Angeles. The chemicals they're using will look like standard contamination at first, but it's designed to cause organ failure over time. Thousands dead before anyone realizes it's not accidental."
"You’re kidding me."
"I wish I were." I pull up chemical formulas that make my stomach turn. "The genius is in the delayed reaction. Initial symptoms mimic standard waterborne illness—nausea, fever, dehydration. By the time organ failure starts, the victims are scattered across hospitals, with no clear pattern. It'll look like multiple unrelated outbreaks until someone runs toxicology, and by then, the infrastructure panic will have started."
"Economic collapse," Sawyer says, understanding immediately.
"Exactly. Markets crash, supply chains break, government paralysis as agencies blame each other." I show him the Phase Two plans. "That's when Prometheus members, embedded throughout government and law enforcement, step in with 'emergency measures.' Martial law, suspension of constitutional rights, reshaping America into their vision of what it should be."
"Time frame?"
"Ninety hours from now. Synchronized to hit during shift changes when security is weakest." I show him the decoded messages. "They've been planning this for two years. Nathan—" My voice catches on his name. "He's been feeding them FBI intelligence the entire time."
Sawyer's studying the data, processing fast. "Why water supplies?"
"Maximum fear, minimum trace. It'll look like an infrastructure failure, not terrorism. They want economic collapse, not credit. Let America eat itself alive with blame while they position themselves for what comes after."
"And Nathan Torres tried to kill you when you found out."
It's not a question, but I answer anyway. "I trusted him completely." The words taste bitter. "I went to him when I found the communications. Told him everything. He tried to inject me with something. I’m sure it would have looked like sudden cardiac arrest."
"How did you stop him?"
I remember the moment—the shock of seeing Nathan's face in the darkness, the needle catching the light, the way betrayal felt like ice water in my veins.
"I've been taking aikido since college. Used his momentum against him, threw him, and ran."
"Where have you been for three days?"
"Moving. Different motels, paying cash, staying offline except for essential research." I close the laptop, exhaustion suddenly crushing. "I tried calling FBI headquarters, but they said I was wanted for treason, that I'd stolen classified data. Nathan flipped the narrative. Made me the terrorist."
